Even though it was summer there was no shortage of interesting news to come across our desks and mailboxes. Google acquired the popular Postini email scanning service. Google...just what won't they buy? The Xandros Linux distribution sponsor acquired Scalix, an open source groupware project. This could help Xandros gather a lilttle more mindshare in the crowded Linux distribution marketplace. Dell acquired Silverback Technologies, one of the premier managed service providers. This can only mean that Dell is serious about reselling managed services to create a “residual” revenue stream for the company. Citrix acquired XenSource, the commercial arm of the open source Xen virtual machine hypervisor project. At $500 million, XenSource was not cheap, but if Citrix is determined to go up against VMWare it may prove to be worthwhile. Yahoo! acquired Zimbra, another open source groupware project. Poor Yahoo! needed to do something...anything. The Scalix, XenSource and Zimbra acquisitions brought a combined price of almost $1 billion. This should silence open source software critics who proclaim that “free software” is worth what you pay for it.
Just when you thought the SCO v. IBM lawsuit over Unix copyright infringement would never end. A U.S. Federal District Court in Utah ruled that Novell not SCO owns the copyrights to Unix and UnixWare. And to make matters worse for SCO, the court also ruled that Novell is entitled to a share of the $30 million in license fees SCO collected from Sun and Microsoft. A month after the court's ruling SCO filed for Chapter 11 protection. Surprise! It turns out you can't sue someone for copyright infringement when you don't own the copyrights! Hopefully this is almost the last we will hear of SCO until it goes into Chapter 7 liquidation. Good riddance.
Microsoft has just about run out of appeals to fight the European Commission's $689 million fine against the company for not opening up Windows code to competing media players. This is another case of Microsoft having more money than sense. Recent court judgments and out of court settlements against Microsoft have cost the company over $5 billion. I know Microsoft has a cash horde of tens of billions but it still seems like a lot of money to fork over for bad and/or illegal behavior. Why can't Microsoft just learn to get along? It would certainly be a lot cheaper.
Finally, the competition against Microsoft Office is getting better organized. Sun's StarOffice is now available for free download from Google Desktop. The free download might be just the Windows version of StarOffice. It shouldn't matter to Linux users who already have OpenOffice.org, which is the open source code base for StarOffice. And IBM has released a free beta of its OpenOffice.org based Lotus Symphony for Windows and Linux. Those of you old enough to remember the first DOS-based Lotus Symphony program back in the mid 1980s will recall that it was pretty much a dud compared with the success of Lotus 1-2-3. However, it was written by Ray Ozzie who turned out Lotus Notes a couple of years later. Ray subsequently developed Groove, which he eventually sold to Microsoft and finally made the move to the “dark side” himself by joining Microsoft. Watch for Ray to keep moving up the Microsoft corporate food chain after Bill Gates departs the middle of 2008.
SET SOAPBOX = OFF
